Feb. 8 (Bloomberg) -- A Montana surgeon testified he
stopped using Johnson & Johnson’s ASR all-metal hip device eight
months before the company recalled it because he was warned
about problems with the implant by a sales rep.

Peter Wendt, testifying yesterday by videotape in state
court in Los Angeles, said he implanted 76 ASRs, including one
in Loren Kransky, 65, of Montana. Kransky’s lawsuit is the first
of 10,000 to go to trial over claims that J&J’s DePuy unit
defectively designed the 93,000 hips recalled in August 2010 and
failed to warn of the risks.

Wendt said he dropped the ASR after talking to DePuy’s Dan
Harrington, who worked with him for years. Harrington, he said,
told him “there’s some problems with this, we are going to pull
it. You really shouldn’t be using it anymore.”

Before that, DePuy never told him about patients who
experienced debris from the cobalt and chromium devices, said
Wendt, who practices in Anaconda, Montana. He said he never knew
DePuy studied a redesign to try to prevent the problems. Had he
known either, he said, he would have stopped using the device.

J&J, the world’s largest seller of health-care products,
denies that it defectively designed the device or that it
contributed to the health problems of Kransky. J&J is based in
New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Wendt said he began using the ASR because DePuy said the
device had a success rate of more than 98 percent.

‘Acing’ Test

“That was like acing the test,” he said.

At the time of the recall, J&J said that 12 percent of its
hips failed in the U.K. within five years. An Australian
registry showed the failure rate last year exceeded 40 percent.
Analysts say the lawsuits may cost J&J billions of dollars.

Wendt said that since he stopped using the ASR, he has
replaced nine or 10, and patients have had four others removed
because of pain, excessive wear or fluid build-up.

When Harrington told him to stop using the ASR, Wendt said,
he hadn’t seen adverse effects. Those emerged later, he said,
including tissue damage and discoloration because of metal ions.

He said he performed Kransky’s surgery in December 2007
without complications from his other medical conditions --
diabetes, hypertension and vascular problems.

The surgeon who replaced Kransky’s hip in February 2012,
Jeffrey Hansen, testified by videotape that he inaccurately
wrote in his medical notes that the joint had loosened. He said
Kransky’s lawyers coached him to make the statement, which he
believed would expedite payment for the surgery.

‘Being Poisoned’

He said he also erred when he wrote: “Because this patient
is basically being poisoned by the metal ions, I think he should
still consider his hip revision.”

The word poison, he said, was used by the Kranskys.

“Perhaps I should have put it in different fashion,” he
said. “The word poison is pretty, pretty, I guess that’s pretty
toxic.”

In his opening statement on Jan. 25, J&J attorney Alexander
Calfo said Hansen would admit he was coached.

Jurors also heard videotaped testimony yesterday from
Christopher Hunt, a DePuy bioengineer, about an ASR surgeon
design team meeting in September 2005.

The jury was shown his draft minutes of the meeting, which
reported that the group discussed adding a toxicologist to
“address the perceived risk of cancer due to metal ion
release.”

‘Useful Study’

“Although it was agreed that would be a useful study to
undertake, concern was raised that the information should be
strictly controlled in the event of it showing a negative
answer,” the minutes said. “There was skepticism that would be
able to produce answers to questions that have been circulating
for a significant time already.”

No study was ever done and a toxicologist was never added.

Hunt was part of a group that spent three years studying a
possible redesign of the ASR to reduce wear and the release of
metal ions. He sought to convey to his superiors that “more
wear was occurring than was expected or intended,” he
testified.